There’s a weird expectation that ideas. people, works of art should be explained somehow. That facts about yourself cannot stand alone but must form part of a reason, a purpose, a coherent narrative of who and how you are. As an artist, standing by my paintings in public I am often asked to explain them, present the reason they were made, the ‘story behind’ them. or something about the process that makes the painting itself make sense.
I have managed to overcome my instinctive distaste for this – I no longer run away or snarl – and I’m happy to talk about the process or about things I see and feel in and about the paintings. However none of this explains why it is as it is, if it does it is only partially and retrospectively. You couldn’t construct a set of reasons that produces precisely this artwork, or precisely this person. You can describe things, but descriptions are not reasons why things they to be as they are.
So, I can speak as myself, I can tell you facts about my artworks and myself but they don’t explain anything. Those facts, those conditions could have produced something quite different. Or maybe not. maybe if we get precise enough then conditions could only have produced what there is. But this is a closer way of looking and not an explanation that stands outside the thing somehow and props it up or justifies it, or allows it to exist in a different kind of realm. the mental, verbal one. the one which is so over-valued in the society I am living in.
Above all, for me the lack of an explanation brings about a sense of the totality of the thing, the truth and an accompanying pleasure. I imagine many other people get a very similar pleasure from finding an explanation for something. For me the explanation pleasure is a kind of satisfaction, a closing down sensation, whereas the no-explanation pleasure is a kind of expanding, all-encompassing feeling, and opening up.
it’s what I hope to feel when encountering art, of any kind, and people, too. An opening up that any explanation would only limit. As Fritz Perls the founder of Gestalt therapy used to say, or something like it anyway, why is not the helpful question to ask in therapy (it only leads to explanations), rather ask how.
I’d rather ask nothing but let the painting be its own question.